Epilepsy in private practice

[NeuroDream]

Background-I’m a EEG/neurophysiology fellowship at a big peds level 4 center, looking to return to California.
So I’ve been on the job interview trail and received some decent (for peds neuro, at least) offers from private practice groups to start a pediatric epilepsy practice, with promises of monitored beds, excellent “epilepsy” referral volume etc. How feasible is it to do this outside of academia? For anyone who has a private epilepsy practice, do you end up reading through 24 hr recordings all day or do you have someone clip recordings? Do private docs ever end up doing phase 2 evals, or do you just surrender them to the academic centers? How do you handle call, especially as the sole epilepsy provider?

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[Telamir]

Feasible.

I’d say you can handle up to VNS but resective surgery is typically handled by academic centers. Depending on your support you may have techs to clip the studies but otherwise you will read them yourself. As far as volume well it’s however much you can handle.

There will be a big “epilepsy referral” by that of course they mean anything that shakes or even remotely resembles a seizure will be sent your way so get used to seeing a lot of nonsense. That being said you probably have encountered this during fellowship.

As far as call it depends on if you’re covering a hospital and they need STAT studies. This is honestly more dependent on your techs than your availability. They tend to be the rate limiting step here. If you’re not covering a hospital or they don’t do stat studies after hours then you’re good. Otherwise then yeah it’ll be busy.